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Truly transformative technologies tend to emerge from relative obscurity, where investors move quickly from manic overhype to utter despair, only to then be followed by the long and hard slog to deliver on the original promise. But ultimately the results surpass the initial hype in ways that could not have been originally imagined. Two early-2000’s vintage technology bubbles -- genomics and the Internet -- experienced such cycles, yet today genomics is genuinely transforming the practice of medicine while the Internet has transformed, well, just about everything else.

The MEMS industry’s own microfluidics technology also went through a bubble-to-bust cycle in the first half of the 2000s. Andreas Manz and his contemporaries who first developed “lab-on-a-chip” technology in the early 1990s are reputed to have dubbed their devices “bioMEMS” just to attract research financing for what at the time an obscure thrust in analytical chemistry.

The West Wireless Health Institute (WWHI, San Diego, Calif.) has recruited MEMS pioneer Mehran Mehregany to head its engineering department. WWHI aims to lower medical costs with wireless telemedicine devices that monitor and supervise a patient's healthful activities “around the clock” while they are at home.

The West Wireless Health Institute was founded in 2009 with a $45 million grant from the Gary and Mary West Foundation -- a medical research organization that aims to cut health care costs with home oriented wireless devices. Late last year the institute hired Mehregany as its executive vice president of engineering and chief of engineering research. And earlier this month an additional $20 million was allotted to support his biomedical engineering research efforts and to support a postdoctoral program which aims to train the next generation of leaders in wireless health care.

Today micro-electro-mechanical systems are enabling lab-on-chip devices that pump picoliters of liquid reagents around on a substrate the same way that electrons are shuttled around on an ordinary microchip. These microfluidic devices promise to downsize medical tests in a manner reminiscent of Dr. McCoy's handheld medical scanner in the Star Trekfranchise.

One outstanding problem in microfluidics, however, is how to supply electrical control signals to MEMS pumps on chips that are riddled with micron-sized channels filled with fluid. The obvious method would be to embed wires into the devices, but metallic wires must be insulated to prevent shorts plus they need electrodes that will not deteriorate in the presence of fluids. Now researchers at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) believe they have the answer -- liquid wires that use waterproof glass electrodes.

Newcomers usually expect that MEMS devices like gyroscopes have internal rotating gymbals similar to their life-sized counterparts. Unfortunately, so far no commercial MEMS chips employ moving parts that are not tethered. Now researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) have received a four-and-a-half-year $5.5 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to get past this obstacle.

Two major motion pictures and two popular video game releases recently used a MEMS motion suit to enable live actors to control virtual characters in real time. Actors in MEMS-sensor-studded suits performed the action scenes, but computer generated imagery (CGI) was what you saw. The same MEMS motion suit that enabled the lifelike characters in Iron Man 2 and Alice in Wonderland, also enabled the recent video games Kill Zone 2 and Borderlands.

The first wave of MEMS was automotive and the killer app was airbag triggers. The second wave of MEMS was consumer electronics and portrait-to-landscape auto-switching was the killer app. Now the third wave of MEMS has begun, according to STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), namely medical applications of MEMS, with the killer app likely to be point-of-care diagnostics.

While volumes for consumer MEMS applications are rapidly increasing, so are competition and downward price pressure. We recently spoke with Frank Melzer, CEO of Bosch Sensortec, about effects of the recession, company growth and product positioning.

Designers of next-generation smartphones are feverishly adding MEMS gyroscopes to the accelerometers that already grace high-end mobile handsets today. Besides providing enhanced sensitivity for gaming apps, gyros will also enable location-based services that work indoors. Every majorhandset vendor is expected to introduce smartphone models with gyroscopes before the end of 2011.

As the industry is pushing for further integration of CMOS and MEMS chips, a startup company Baolab claims that it has developed a process with which a variety of MEMS devices can be made on standard CMOS lines. We recently spoke with David Doyle, the company’s CEO, about the process’ advantages and limitations as well as competitive CMOS MEMS efforts from other companies and industry groups.